IAT 312: Foundations of Game Design

For their final game project, stu­dents were asked to design a non-digital game that includes Lazzaro’s so-called “seri­ous fun’ aspect: That is, the game should be mean­ing­ful or add value, e.g., by pro­vid­ing a novel/meaningful user expe­ri­ence, dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, altered states etc.

Main tex­book: Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (2014) by Tracy Fullerton (avail­able online through the SFU library).

Pictures from final showcase on Dec 13, 2017

Sample Project Videos

IAT 445: Immersive Environments

(first taught in Spring 2013)

Course Description

In this project-based course, you will use an immer­sion frame­work to design, create, and eval­u­ate immer­sive vir­tual envi­ron­ments and the inter­ac­tion between the user and the vir­tual envi­ron­ment. To do this, we will com­bine hands-on fun­da­men­tals with inter­ac­tion, ani­ma­tion, and immer­sive vir­tual real­ity design and the­o­ret­i­cal and research con­cerns. Your project will serve to both moti­vate and implement/showcase these aspects. The course will cul­mi­nate in a final inter­ac­tive project show­case and project pitch (oral/video) of your team project.

4. Engage in a small team, to apply an agile and iter­a­tive inter­ac­tion design process to define project goals and processes, and then iter­a­tively design, build, eval­u­ate and refine an immer­sive envi­ron­ment and the user’s inter­ac­tion with it.

What’s in it for you?

In a nut­shell: you’ll learn how to design, build, and iter­a­tively refine a cool immer­sive and inter­ac­tive vir­tual envi­ron­ment that should blow the user away. To do this, you will use the pop­u­lar Unity 3D game engine and guid­ance from an immer­sion frame­work. If you manage to imple­ment it on your mobile phone/tablet using a simple card­board view like the FOV2Go or the Oculus Rift, you’ll be able to show­case it wher­ever you go – includ­ing your next job inter­view and your next party. Combining a public project show­case with an exec­u­tive sum­mary and a final project video can fur­ther improve your resume/portfolio and marketability.

On Friday June 23, 2017, the stu­dents from my course on “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” (IAT 445) will be pre­sent­ing their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10am — 2:30pm.

9 stu­dent teams will show­case their own immer­sive Virtual Reality projects that they devel­oped in the pop­u­lar game engine Unity3D and will present using the Oculus Rift head-mounted display.

Get ready to become a polar bear expe­ri­enc­ing the after­maths of our own deci­sion and how it affects global warm­ing, VR sur­vival train­ing while con­fronted with con­flict­ing inner voices, being a synaes­thete (seeing sound) in tur­moil over a con­flict of artis­tic aspi­ra­tions, unrav­el­ing the mys­ter­ies of an aban­doned man­sion, emo­tion­ally con­nect­ing to a child’s inner world by expe­ri­enc­ing their dreams, expe­ri­enc­ing the lone­li­ness of an aban­doned dog first-hand/paw, and much more.

Some projects draw from con­tem­po­rary indie/art com­puter games like Dear Esther, Journey, or Stanley’s Parable and cinema, fiction/sci-fi, and of course VR. Students were tasked to design for a pur­pose­ful and immer­sive user expe­ri­ence — this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was Going beyond: “Use unity3D and guid­ing frame­works (e.g., immer­sion, pres­ence, user-centered sys­tems design etc.) to iter­a­tively ideate, design, pro­to­type, and eval­u­ate an immer­sive and inter­ac­tive vir­tual envi­ron­ment expe­ri­ence that “goes beyond”: How could you pro­vide inter­est­ing, inspir­ing, or mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences in VR? That is, what expe­ri­ences could you pro­vide in VR that are oth­er­wise dif­fi­cult, dan­ger­ous, or hard to expe­ri­ence? Instead of using VR as only a past-time and ulti­mate sen­sory over­load tool to wow people, how could you use it for some­thing more inter­est­ing, novel, excit­ing, or mean­ing­ful?” Be pre­pared for some excit­ing showcases!

In case you can’t make it to the inter­ac­tive project show­case, you can join the public project video pre­sen­ta­tion ses­sion on Thursday June 29th at 2:30pm, in Surrey room #5380, or wait for the best videos to be posted online.

Pictures from showcase:

Sample Project Videos

Project posters:

Executive summaries that were handed out during the showcase

Showcase and Project Videos from Fall 2016 offering

IAT 445 immer­sive envi­ron­ments show­case Fall 2016

Below are the project posters and pic­tures from our show­case on Friday December 9th 2016, where stu­dents from my course on “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” (IAT 445) pre­sented their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus, from about 10:00am — 2pm. See also SFU’s Media Advisory.

Students were tasked to design for a pur­pose­ful and immer­sive user expe­ri­ence — this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was evok­ing a strong yet mean­ing­ful feel­ing of empathy

Sample Project Videos

Below are the project posters:

and the first page of the executive summaries (see here for Full pdf's)

other project pictures and materials:

Showcase and Project Videos from Summer Intersession 2015 offering

Below are the project posters and pic­tures from our show­case on Friday June 26th 2015

this semester’s design chal­lenge for stu­dents was evok­ing a strong yet mean­ing­ful emo­tional or vis­ceral response using an immer­sive envi­ronemnt built with the game engine Unity3D that most stu­dents just started learn­ing at the begin­ning of the semester.

Impressions from the showcase:

Examples from Project Showcase

On April 4 & 5th 2013, the stu­dents from the “immer­sive envi­ron­ments” course (IAT 445) pre­sented their final projects in the Mezzanine on our SFU Surrey campus. 9 Teams show­cased their own immer­sive Virtual Reality projects that they devel­oped in the pop­u­lar game engineUnity3D - for most of them this was their first expo­sure to the soft­ware. Below are first impres­sions of the show­case — thanks to all the stu­dents for their great contributions!

IAT 802: Quantitative Research Methods and Design

(taught in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2018 …)

Course Objectives, Learning Goals & Outcomes

The course struc­ture and teaching/learning activ­i­ties are designed around the fol­low­ing ques­tions. That is, by actively par­tic­i­pat­ing in this course, stu­dents should be able to effec­tively address the fol­low­ing ques­tions and per­form the respec­tive tasks:

1) What is sci­ence, the “sci­en­tific method” and quan­ti­ta­tive research? How do you think and argue like a good scientist?

2) Why do sci­ence? What is sci­en­tific & quan­ti­ta­tive research useful for?

a) Why could you be excited about sci­ence? What drives and excites a researcher?

b) What are advan­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of quan­ti­ta­tive & sci­en­tific research meth­ods (as com­pared to other meth­ods)? That is, what are they appro­pri­ate and useful for?

a) Experimental design: How to design an effec­tive exper­i­ment? What does effec­tive mean?

b) Descriptive sta­tis­tics: How to present data effec­tively? What does effec­tive mean?

c) Inferential sta­tis­tics: What can you con­clude from quan­ti­ta­tive data? Why? What are your chances of being wrong? How do you decide which sta­tis­ti­cal meth­ods to use? How to apply them prop­erly? How to do this in a given sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis software?

5) How to com­mu­ni­cate all that effec­tively and scholarly?

6) How to crit­i­cally eval­u­ate and dis­cuss the qual­ity of quan­ti­ta­tive / sci­en­tific research (of your­self and others)?

"What's in it for me"?

Practically speak­ing, engag­ing in this course will (hope­fully) enable you to

no longer fear sta­tis­tics (in case you ever might have ;-), but instead appre­ci­ate and enjoy the beauty and craft of rig­or­ous sci­en­tific research

tackle your own thesis research projects suc­cess­fully, by having the most pow­er­ful sci­en­tific research tool­box at your fingertips

have enough skills to con­tinue learn­ing and apply­ing scientific/quantitative research meth­ods prop­erly (the goal of the course is to give you a solid basis in the basic research meth­ods and the skills to keep learn­ing and suc­cesss­fully apply­ing more advanced ones)

Project presentations

On November 26th, the 17 stu­dents in my grad course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2016 give their final 5:30-min project pre­sen­ta­tions in the SIAT research col­lo­quium at Simon Fraser University. Enjoy!

Stephanie Wong: Easy A: assess­ing student’s abil­ity to cheat with smart­watch
Abraham Hashemian: Leaning-Based 360 Locomotion Interfaces: How good are they for nav­i­ga­tion in Virtual Reality

Serkan Pekcetin: Measuring the Effect of Binaural Audio on the Sense of Direction in Virtual Environments

Xintian Sun: Where Was It? Evaluating Spatial Memory in Different Backgrounds from Static and Moving Viewpoints

Project presentations from Fall 2014 offering

On November 26th 2014, the 9 stu­dents in my grad course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2014 gave their final 7-min project pre­sen­ta­tions in the SIAT research col­lo­quium at Simon Fraser University. Enjoy! I think the stu­dents did an amaz­ing job, quite proud of them! — for many it was their first sci­en­tific research project and presentation!

Project presentations from Fall 2012 offering

For the first time, stu­dents from the SIAT grad­u­ate course on “Quantitative Research Methods & Design (IAT802)” that I taught in Fall 2012 at SIAT gave their final 6-min project pre­sen­ta­tion pub­licly in the SIAT research col­lo­quium. Enjoy! I think the stu­dents did a won­der­ful job — for many it was their first sci­en­tific research project and presentation!